Chinese American Pleads Guilty After Attempting to Take Trade Secrets to China

A Chinese man has pleaded guilty after trying to board a flight carrying trade secrets from his Kansas-based employer to China, according to federal prosecutors.

Zhang Junjie, 57, also known as Jeff Zhang, pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas announced on April 1.

According to prosecutors, Zhang, a naturalized U.S. citizen from China, was a resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He worked for a Wichita-based aviation company as a senior material and process engineer, which gave him access to confidential data and proprietary information.

The company reported Zhang to the FBI in 2018 after he “displayed suspicious behavior” during a work trip to China, according to prosecutors.

In September 2019, Zhang was stopped by Customs and Border Protection agents at an airport in Dallas before he could board a plane bound for China.

When asked by the agents, Zhang initially made the false claim that he didn’t have any work-related information on the thumb drives and laptop that he was carrying at the time.

Zhang later changed his claim after the agents examined his electronic devices and found documents from his employer labeled “Proprietary” and “Confidential,” including graphs and blueprints related to the company’s aviation work. According to prosecutors, Zhang subsequently said he was authorized by his employer to have the documents.

Prosecutors said the company later confirmed that Zhang’s statement was false and that he was not authorized to possess the documents.

According to the plea agreement, the proprietary data on Zhang’s electronic devices was estimated to be worth between $95,000 and $150,000.

Zhang faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release, according to the plea agreement.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Zhang is scheduled to be sentenced on July 23.

The Epoch Times contacted Zhang’s lawyer but did not receive a response by publication time.

“Americans invest heavily into technological research and development,” Ryan A. Kriegshauser, U.S. attorney for the District of Kansas, said in a statement.

“Intellectual property theft causes U.S. companies across numerous sectors to lose billions of dollars a year. Often that cost ultimately falls on consumers. Not only are Internet hackers a risk for this theft but so are insider threats from rouge employees.”

In 2017, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimated that the U.S. economy suffers an annual loss of between $225 billion and $600 billion due to counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets.

The commission called China the “world’s principal IP [intellectual property] infringer.”

“China continues to obtain American IP from U.S. companies operating inside China, from entities elsewhere in the world, and of course from the United States directly through conventional as well as cyber means,” the commission wrote. “These include coercive activities by the state designed to force outright IP transfer or give Chinese entities a better position from which to acquire or steal American IP.”

Lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed at tackling the issue.

Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-Utah) and Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) introduced the Combatting China’s Pilfering of Intellectual Property (CCP IP) Act last year. According to Kennedy’s office, the legislation would impose sanctions on “any person or entity determined to have engaged in a pattern of significant IP theft” or has “received stolen U.S. IP knowingly.”

The legislation would also bar entry to the United States for senior Chinese Communist Party officials, top government leaders, and active-duty Chinese military personnel, until Beijing takes “meaningful steps” to stop the ongoing pattern of IP theft.

In November 2025, a former engineer with dual U.S.–Chinese citizenship was sentenced to 46 months in prison, after pleading guilty to one count of theft of trade secrets. The engineer was found guilty of stealing infrared technology used by the United States to detect nuclear missile launches and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.